I'm making the following hair, and I'm having trouble in making the hair clips invisible in the second preset.

What I'm doing:

• I cloned the AF Pigtails on TSRW
• the first preset has all the hair and hat textures as it should and also has enabled one pattern to recolor the acc.
• in the second preset, I disabled the recolor pattern for the acc and also made empty the hat mask and hat multiplier (so I could just alpha-edit the hair clips and they wouldn't show up in game) (aaand because I noticed that this same method was used in other CC hairs with hat to get the same result)

But, as shown in the image, the hair texturing is showing in the clips when no texture should be showing, and I have no idea of what I did wrong etc

(also before anyone else suggests to just do the clips as separate acc, initially I thought about that but I didn't want to clutter the acc tab even more x.x)

Hi there!

From my own experiments with trying to make a hat-hair that had length variants using the same kind of idea, I had come to the conclusion that this way may not be possible- as the GEOM itself has the alpha for the main texture written directly into its shader data.
But you've mentioned that there are existing CC hair with this effect- would you be able to provide a link to any of them? I'd be more than happy to reverse engineer how it works, as I'd all but given up on the concept.

The hair accy is actually part of the hair mesh, and uses the simhair shader, which shows as fully transparent when there is no multiplier or diffuse map for that part on the UV map. If using the EA ponytails, just make a "chip" to replace the hair ties. Chip being a single triangle face that uses headnew bone, and position it in the center of the Sim head.

Make the hair with accy in the same mesh. The accy will have the simhair shader, so will be completely transparent without the multiplier. Simskin shader will do what you show in your pics. Place the accy UV off of the hair diffuse area as normal for hats. The rest of what you did looks right.

This is basically how Leah Lilith did her Harley Quinn hair. Also similar technique to how Newsea did a few hairs that may have an extra braid in one preset, but not in the second. The second was just done in the diffise.

Here are two that have this effect (linking to my own retextures since it's easier lol) Sintiklia Scarlet and Newsea Hideout Door




yep I was doing the acc in one group and the hair in another, I'll try this this instead!

Easiest thing to do is to open an example package in both TSRW, and s3pe, and look inside. TSRW shows relation of hair/ hat textures, and s3pe, you can see which shader is used for which mesh. In Blender, you will see that the hair and accy are the same mesh, and UV layouts. That Newsea hair is also done as I mentioned the other Newsea hair is done, and the Leah Lilith hair.

Thank you very much for the links! I see now that it's slightly different than what I was working on due to using the accessory texture and mask. I think swapping visible hair pieces is still at the mercy of the mesh data, but I'll keep bashing my head against it

I'm sure you can get it working from this point, but I'd also like to drop a recommendation for CTU (CAS Texture Unitool) when working with these kinds of changes. You just open the package and go to the Designs tab- there will be a 3D preview and access to all the IDs and patterns and such. It's an older tool, but can actually achieve some very fine tuning you cannot easily do in S3PE or TSRW.

Download Newsea j83 Titanium. That hair has 2 presets. One has a braided section, the other does not. The only difference between the two, is the one with braid has texture on that part of the UV map where the braid UV is, and the one without the braid, simply doesn't have txture. Both use the same mesh, which has the braid.

Has braid...

No braid...


If you are trying to make a preset with longer hair and shorter, probably tuck strands behind the shorter hair, completely separate them on the UV map, and make one diffuse that only textures the short version, and another diffuse that also covers both.

Thank you! Finding examples is the hardest part when they don't mention the effect in the name or description, I wasn't sure if it had ever been done.

What I'd like to do is make hats with their hair variants consolidated into one item, so that MC Compact Mode tidies them into one entry vs EA's 3-4 individual CASParts. I will spend some time comparing this file with mine until I figure out what I was missing

I just did what LadySmoks suggested and it worked out! Thank you so much guys

Also, what was confusing me was that Sintiklia's hair having the hair clip in the separate group and even like that getting invisible (I guess it got the shader edited for that to work)